Village Phone and Transmedia

Videos

Transmedia

Interview with Henry Jenkins

What is Transmedia?

Analysis

The three videos are all about transmedia. The idea of telling a story through multiple different pieces of media. The video by Daily Tech News is a simple explanation of this topic using movies to illustrate the idea. Henry Jenkins, on the other hand, goes deeper into the implications of transmedia and how it is more than fictional storytelling and spans across more than books and movies into the world of social media. 

Additionally, in the interview with Henry, he talks about participatory culture and how, as the world becomes more connected, our knowledge becomes collective and collaborative. Henry mentions how the “renaissance man” does not exist in a network society, how nobody knows everything. In a world like this we rely on our collective knowledge to fill in those gaps.

These ideas can work in tandem with each other. The concept of using different forms of media to aid our collective understanding of some topic. An example that comes to mind is, perhaps, a prominent event. When something notable happens we often see it scattered across media in many different snippets. But, through these many different perspectives we can come to a greater understanding of the event in question.

It Takes a Village to Find a Phone

It Takes a Village To Find a Phone is an article about the power of collective action. The beginning follows a series of events that happened in New York in the year 2006. A bride named Ivanna had lost her Sidekick brand phone in a taxi cab. Initially this was as average as any time someone had lost a phone. However, Ivanna had important information for her wedding plans stored on the device and her drive to retrieve it was higher than most. After her first attempt to retrieve the phone, where she employed the help of her friend Eric Gutmann in sending an email to the phone hoping anyone who found it would receive the message, failed, she decided to bite the bullet and buy a new phone. Evidently, the phone company was able to restore data from the old phone to the new phone, which revealed the individual who had found it. This small incident then grew into a much greater phenomenon when Sasha, the girl who now had possession of the phone, was vehemently against the notion of returning it. Ivanna had turned back to Eric for help. The webpage set up for the situation began to gain momentum. Many people in the community were reading and emailing and voicing their thoughts on the matter. This event, growing further, was picked up by local news, and then regional news, and eventually making it to Times Magazine itself. The website had enough power to harass the New York Police Department into acting on the case. It has enough power to get a rise out of military police after Sasha’s brother claimed to be one and was threatening violence. And all this for a single lost and unreturned phone.

The author of this article, Clay Shirky, uses these events to make a point about the power of media. Without Evan’s website, the phone would have not likely been returned. However, this provides an interesting dilemma. When is it too much? Do the misguided actions of a lesser privileged teenage girl deserve the attention of an entire nation? Did Sasha deserve to be stalked, harassed, and eventually arrested? Probably not. Ideally, the police should have retrieved and returned the phone and that should have been the end of it. But, also think of this; in another world, Evan’s website got no attention whatsoever and the case peters out. It is also not hard to imagine the situation continuing to escalate. After all, anyone following the case had access to the home address of Sasha and her family. The entire scenario wonderfully showcases the unpredictable and often volatile nature of media.